My Mother

I tell people I was born in a room full of cats with no doctors present in a castle atop a hill in the woods. That’s close enough to the truth. One of my exes would tell people the cats licked me clean under the kitchen table. That’s not true, we’ve never had a kitchen table.

My mother dances to the beat of a different drum. If you’re lucky the path of your life may lead to the place where my mother still dances. Countless have and in the new connected world hardly a week goes by that one doesn’t find their way back. “You’re the best teacher I ever had,” they always say. She’ll never believe it, but she hugs them anyway.

My mother is the most Faithful person I’ve ever met. No one quite knows what gods and goddesses she believes in, but it doesn’t matter, her Faith is displayed in others. This is what makes her the best teacher I ever had.

If you asked her I imagine she’d say all education is special, that she doesn’t see a distinction, but still she chose to work with the hardest ones to teach, the “emotionally disturbed.” For several shining years she worked with a “gifted handicapped” program full of young artists and arsonists. As the children rush headlong through the stalks toward the cliff know that there are catchers in the rye, my mother is one of them.

My mother teaches in a way that we never realize we’re learning. Wax on, wax off, watch her dance, follow her steps. “You can do it,” she will call to you. In time you will find that you can.

My mother is a witch. There are crystals and tools of divination strewn about the castle and a box of rocks and bones. Her constant shadow is the venerable black cat who accompanies her everywhere. A murder of crows she calls “my boys” follow her from tree to tree as she walks through the neighborhood.

Despite all her Faith and magic she could not protect me from the monsters in the house. One would put the cancer in my soul and the other would shatter my psyche. She shouldn’t feel bad, I couldn’t protect her from them either, though I wanted nothing more in the world.

The little one put the Fear in me, the Fear that would become the frantic gnawing at my being and guide me to make a lifetime of bad decisions. Emotionally disturbed, indeed. The big one, in a single moment of violence, would break me in two. The first Split. The first time I felt Hate, and oh I hated him and all men ever after and I still do. Handicapped after. Gifted? TBD.

My mother gave me my sister. I resented it at the time, the Fear of abandonment and being replaced already weighing heavily on my young mind. I had started reading spookily young and by that time was already living in a world of books. This helped and didn’t, as not all stories have happy endings. My mother has given me gifts too innumerable to count, but the best of all has been my sister. As a baby she looked like an angry little bird and she still does.

My mother protected me. She let me construct walls of books and movie reels and hide behind them from a world that is still too harsh and cruel for me. The model I lived with for a while once said “Your mother raised a gentle flower.” She was a witch, too. They’ve always seen right through me. She was right. I am thorny and poisonous and easily crushed.

My mother showed us as much of the world’s beauty as she could. How many evenings did we race along sandy roads to Sunset Beach to witness the daily miracle again? She drove us west one summer, along The Trail of Tears, to show us the ugliness too.

I know my mother blames herself for the bleak sadness that afflicted me most of my life, but none of it was her fault. From the far side now, I can let her know that beyond a shadow of a doubt. The shackles of despair guided me every step of the way, but if I did not always return to the place where my mother dances I would not be here today. Like all vampires I must sleep on my native soil.

I know my mother blames herself for the time I crawled into the snow to die what I thought would be a romantic, poetic death, but that had nothing to do with her. That was the Hate and Fear. My mother is only Love.

My best friend just called me. I told her I was writing about my mom and crying. “Your mom is the best mom,” she said, and burst into tears. She is an orphan. She is right.

My mother has always had Faith in me, just as she has a thousand wayward kids, shuffled off by their school districts to become someone else’s problem, expected to end up in prison or dead. They reach out to her now, those kids who fell through all the cracks into the place where my mother dances. They tell her about their careers and loves and families. She was the best teacher they ever had.

“You are a special needs child,” the model would also say, leveling her witch’s eyes at me. She was right about that, too. I cannot imagine where I would be without my mother.

She taught me compassion and humility and humor. She has been a vegetarian since college and I tried that for a long while, but it didn’t take. Time has slowed during quarantine, but my mother never slows down, though her hair is now a rare shade of sterling silver. “Who’s your colorist?” the old ladies in town ask her. “The sun,” she replies.

We’ve been closed off in the castle for over a year now and, as always, she has found joy in the small things. The yard has become her classroom and the wildlife her children. The squirrels take peanuts from her hand and every night a possum and raccoon she swears are married come to eat table scraps on the patio, but her favorite visitors are the skulk of foxes that come often. She rarely misses them as the surly black cat raises an alarm whenever intruders approach the house. There is joy in watching them, I can attest to that. “Look at the little ones,” she says.

My mother saved my life. At the end of my rope, beyond all hope, she convinced me to try a radical new treatment for depression and it worked. It sounds hyperbolic to say I spent my life in agony, but it is an understatement. All that pain was washed away in a white-hot blaze as I sat in a dentist’s chair in a strip mall with a needle in my arm. My mother knows that not all stories have happy endings and that not every tried-and-true method works for every child. She looked outside the box and saved me from my own sad and desperate self.

I owe everything to my mother. I can see that now, with the fog lifted, seemingly gone for good. The world outside our castle is harsher and crueler than ever, but I have spent more time dancing with my mother than anyone and I can finally see the beautiful world she lives in for myself. Thank you, Mom. I Love you.